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Premier’s Work Report: The Difference a Decade Makes?

Watching Premier Wen Jiabao deliver his annual speech at the national legislature on Saturday, two things stand out: Unlike his predecessor, he’s not afraid to talk openly — and at some length — about the grave social and political problems facing China. But he’s no more forthcoming about how to fix them.

Sheng Jiapeng/Color China Photos/Zuma Press

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao appears on the first day of the 11th National People’s Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Mar. 05, 2011.

The government, Mr. Wen admits frankly, has “not yet fundamentally solved a number of issues that the masses feel strongly about.”

He lists the issues the government has yet to solve: “Lack of high-quality educational and medical resources, and their uneven distribution; increasing upward pressure on prices, exorbitant housing price increases in some cities; increasing social problems resulting from illegal land expropriations and housing demolitions; significant problems concerning food safety; and rampant corruption in some areas.”

That’s just for starters. Mr. Wen goes on to bemoan the “excessive concentration of power and lack of checks on power.” He enumerates the many ways that migrant workers from the countryside are discriminated against in the cities. He refers to the tenuous land rights of the country’s farmers.

And he nods to public anger at the proliferation of expensive cars for officials, perhaps the most public symbol in China today of the corruption eating away at the government and Communist Party.

Contrast this with then Premier Zhu Rongji’s performance at the National People’s Congress a decade ago. In his speech, which in those days focused more on the five year plan, Mr. Zhu managed to cram all the troublesome issues like corruption and growing income imbalances into a single perfunctory sentence, tacked on like an afterthought to a heroic description of the government’s economic triumphs over the previous five years.

Unwilling to dwell on failure, Mr. Zhu conceded only that these problems are “not unrelated to shortcomings and errors in our work.”

CNN

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao talks with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in this screenshot taken from CNN’s website in October, 2010. In comments censored inside China, Wen was unusually frank with Zakaria about the problems China faced and his desire to see more political reform.

For all its relative candor, Mr. Wen’s speech doesn’t go much further in assigning blame — or proposing solutions. He makes pro-forma statements about upholding the rule of law, at a time when authorities have launched a new crackdown on activist lawyers. He talks about the need to “strengthen the work related to the handling of petitioners’ letters and visits,” even as authorities try to smother this traditional form of political protest, sometimes with violence. Mr. Zhu went so far as to mention human rights in his speech: Mr. Wen didn’t. Mr. Zhu spoke of elections: Mr. Wen ignored the subject.

The gap between Mr. Wen’s eloquent description of the problems, and his unconvincing attempts to outline steps to address them, is striking. Is that his point?

It almost looks as though the premier is deliberately calling attention to the lack of political reform within the system. After all, this is the same premier who created a stir last year with a speech in Shenzhen in which he said that “[w]ithout the safeguard of political reform, the fruits of economic reform would be lost and the goal of modernization would not materialize.”

Nobody expected him to say that at the legislature. But it seemed to be the implication.